Overclocking

We can overclock the EVGA 960 two ways, one of which we have seen for the first time in EVGA Precision X 16 (which is made by EVGA and not rivatuner) , which was not present in MSI Afterburner, EVGA KBOOST and traditional overclocking using PrecisionX or the tool of your choice.

EVGA KBOOST mode forces GPU BOOST 2.0 to run at a high speed full-time rather than throttle depending on dynamic load. We have not seen this mode before on competitor brands and the caveat here is simply heat and power as well as a slightly lower peak clock speed.

We monitored 59C in Bioshock and 74c in Dirt 3 with a slight throttle to 1418 because of the temperature. Since gaming loads (versus stress tests) typically don't end up overloading the GPU and resulting in boost being disabled, in the quick testing we saw little to no difference for forcing GPU BOOST on, and may have limited benefit primarily for benchmarking as described by EVGA.

EVGA KBOOST PERFORMANCE - GTX 960 SSC

Test

Without KBOOST

With KBOOST

Bioshock

Min 28FPS AVG 72 FPS

Min 27FPS AVG 77

Dirt3

Min 103 AVG 128

Min 105 AVG 127

3DMark Firestrike

6862

6798

Traditional overclocking is of course supported and we have up to +100mv of overvoltage. Since the EVGA SSC model is already Boosted we could only achieve a 50MHz core and 50MHz Memory overclock in very limited testing. Furmark would freeze above 50MHz even with the full +100mv overvolt.

50MHz OC,gave us a 1480 Boost speed, which dropped to 1468 during Bioshock Infinite benchmark, at 72c. Dirt3 also ran at 1468 and 72c.